When stories connect
Midday in Boston and my wife and I are standing on the platform at Charles Street waiting for the inbound Red Line train. We are going only two stops to Washington Street to renew our Senior Charlie Cards, but age somehow makes Beacon Hill steeper than it used to be, and so we take the train.
At this time of day, we share the space with only one other person, a thin man with long hair, an unkempt beard, and ragged clothes. He sits on the bench with his laptop open and tuned in to a video with the sound just loud enough to hear. We sit beside him, exchange smiles and hear snatches of narration from what sounds like a science fiction video. The train pulls in, the doors slide open, and the three of us are swallowed into the metal box where we dissolve into the mix of passengers, each going about their own business.
Each of us is living our own story, complex, multi-layered narratives with one thing in common. Every story has a hero and that hero is the narrator. We are each the hero of our own story, surrounded by a cast of supporting actors moving outward from family and close friends to acquaintances who come and go from our lives, to the extras glued to their laptops or sipping coffee in the background.
There is a sadness that comes from realizing how insignificant our own stories really are, how many stories we will never hear, and how fundamentally alone we are in the world. That sadness has a name, “sonder.”
The word was coined by American writer John Koenig in 2012 for his blog, “The Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows.” In 2021, Koenig turned his blog into a book in which he introduces words he invented for peculiar feelings that many of us have had without having the vocabulary to talk about them easily.
Though I did not know the word “sonder,” I have had the realization and the feeling it describes. In fact, I even dared to think that I had discovered a new philosophical principle (See “hubris,” from the Greek for excessive pride) until a 16-year-old boy I’ll call Sam to protect his privacy told me I was referring to sonder.
My enlightenment came in a conversation with Sam and his friend, “Zach” during one of our weekly meetings in the Sages & Seekers program.
The program pairs high school sophomores with senior citizens for five weeks of conversation culminating in a tribute essay that the student writes about his senior. This year, I was fortunate to be given two students, and the three of us quickly bonded around the concept of connections as we talked around a table, joking about channeling Socrates, Aristotle, and Plato.
They asked the usual questions, and I gave the usual answers while turning the interview into a conversation in which they could share their own experiences and ideas. We soon discovered that the three of us shared a deep appreciation of connection to family and friends, old and new.
While we were talking about this, something quite extraordinary happened. Zach mentioned a detail of his family’s history and I knew at once that I had heard this story before. It was the same detail his mother had shared 20 years earlier when I supervised her during her internship in clinical psychology. Earlier in our conversation, Zach had told me that his mother, whom I’ll call Katherine, was a psychologist, and so I said, “You must be Katherine’s son.”
“What?” Zach replied, “You know my Mom?”
Against all odds and the passage of decades, I found myself deep in conversation with the 16-year-old son of one of my former students under circumstances completely different from the ones that had brought his mother into my life.
The three of us exchanged looks of amazement, and for an instant, time seemed to stop. I explained our connection and asked my friend to say hi to his Mom from me. Then, we delved into the meaning of what had just happened.
We all know the concept of six degrees of separation, that each of us is only six interpersonal connections away from any other person. That may be true, but the older I get, the smaller the gap seems to become. Sometimes, we’re only four steps apart, occasionally three and rarely, like today, just one.
Perhaps it is a simple matter of more years giving us more time to meet more people so that our larger social network gives us more pathways to connect to others. Maybe events like this are an example of what Carl Jung called synchronicity, a seemingly meaningful coincidence that in this case, put a 16-year-old boy in conversation with a 77- year-old man who had once been one of his mother’s teachers.
After our conversation about sonder, the discovery of this unsuspected connection felt like an antidote to the sadness of isolation that sonder implies. Moments like this can remind us that in spite of our differences, we are each building a life that can connect with the lives of others. Because of our differences, those connections can form a grand design and provide a vision of a more complex world than we can ever dream of in isolation. We cannot know all the world, but we can be open to our corner of it.
By approaching others with curiosity and respect, we can become, in the words of John Henry Newman, “a link in a chain, a bond of connection between persons.” What would that look like? How would that feel? Where is the Dictionary of Obscure Delights that can tell us?